Why You Need Advice: We've Measured How Complicated the New Zealand Insurance Market Is

Given only four of the main types of cover: Life, TPD, Trauma, and Income Protection (and there are more - see the note below about Medical insurance and mortgage cover) you might be forgiven for thinking the market is simple.

We then considered the top 14 insurers - and yes, we know there are more, but as you will see, even with only these the market is complicated enough.

Between those fourteen companies and four products there are as many as 25 product types - for example Agreed Value, Indemnity, and Loss of Earnings Income Protection products.

Between all the product types there are 723 features or items that can be separately quantified and considered in making a product recommendation.

When you then take into account the number of products actually offered by the companies the number of items for products offered by different insurers (which can therefore be significantly different, in ways which might make a big difference to clients) is 4,268

On average we review six variations or issues in each item type - in a typical special events option there are more than a dozen, in some items there is only one issue to consider. Add up all of those points and there are as many as 25,608 specific points of difference possible.

Little wonder that people contemplating insurance want advice.

How do we know these figures? Well it's because we extracted them from our policy comparison database, which is the engine behind Quality Product Research which you can find at www.quotemonster.co.nz